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As the US prepares for military action in Syria, the reactions of Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott are entirely in keeping with previous ALP and Coalition failures to put Australian military forces before their own party alliances with Washington.

Australia needs to send emergency medical aid to Syria immediately and assist an independent assessment of the situation. It must not rush towards sacrificing its young soldiers on behalf of an ambitious foreign power before the jury is in. Continue Reading…

The Daily Telegraph’s coverage of the Federal election undermines Australian Democracy, Wikileaks Party Senate Candidates said today.

In addition to its front-page headline last Monday “Finally you have a chance to kick this mob out”, on Thursday it portrayed the Prime Minister Mr Rudd and his Deputy Anthony Albanese as the incompetent Nazis from Hogan’s Heroes.

Every media outlet is entitled to nail its colours to the mast when it comes to editorialising for one political philosophy or one party over another, but will we see the whole? Clearly there can be no objection to a newspaper taking a political position ­– that is a part of democratic discourse – but when such blatant political positioning is combined with the pitiful facts of the extreme concentration of ownership in the Australian media, we have to be concerned for the health of Australian democracy.

This is a Statement by WikiLeaks Party Senate Candidates Kellie Tranter (NSW), Gerry Georgatos (WA ) and Leslie Cannold (VIC)

The conviction of Private Bradley Manning at his Pentagon driven trial is the clearest warning of the fate awaiting WikiLeaks founder and WikiLeaks Party Victorian Senate candidate Julian Assange, if he is extradited to the United States.

Foreign Minister Bob Carr should also admit that his statements about Mr Assange not being of interest to the US are palpably false. Julian Assange would face a Grand Jury indictment alleging espionage, treason, and terrorism and face a life sentence locked up in a US jail.

The political party started by Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, will be officially launched today (Thursday 25 July). The six other Senate candidates will be announced and the principal policies of the party will be discussed by Mr Assange who will be speaking to the media via Skype from London.

The launch will be at 12:00 pm at The Reading Room, Fitzroy Library where Mr Assange will outline the Party’s policies on Asylum Seekers and Climate Change.

Online news service Crikey revealed today that Telstra entered into
agreements with the FBI and the US Department of Justice in 2001 to monitor
and store metadata and other private information of American, Australian and
potentially Chinese citizens via their undersea cable infrastructure.

The WikiLeaks Party today called on the Rudd government to reveal the nature of intelligence being collected by Australian defence facilities on behalf of the United States.

Earlier this week Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence officer, revealed that the US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and three Australian Signals Directorate facilities: the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Facility at Geraldton and the naval communications station HMAS Harman near Canberra are collecting data for the National Security Agency X-Keyscore data collection program.

The WikiLeaks Party congratulates Kevin Rudd on his elevation to Leader of the Australian Labor Party and Prime Minister elect.

We would urge Mr Rudd to stand by his early defence of WikiLeaks Editor-In-Chief and Victorian Senate Candidate Julian Assange, when he tempered the now infamous prejudicial, inaccurate and hyperbolic statements from former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, when he made the following statement on 13th December 2010:

Under Commonwealth, state and territory laws police and security agencies currently have access to data about which Internet sites you have been looking at, who you are calling and who is calling you, where you are located when using your phone or accessing your email account.

This information can be gathered without agencies such and ASIO, Federal Police and state and territory police getting a search warrant from a judicial officer. All that is required is for a senior officer of those organisations to give permission.

This data collection activity is proving disturbingly popular. In 2011-12 there were 300,000 such interceptions, up from 250,000 in 2010-11.

This is a comment today from the Wikileaks Party 2013 Federal Election Campaign Director Greg Barns on comments made by Foreign Minister Bob Carr about Julian Assange and Australian Government support:

Senator Carr’s remarks about Mr Assange and the Australian Government’s attitude to support for him, made to a Senate Committee yesterday and reported in today’s media, should concern all Australians.

Senator Carr told the Senate committee that in relation to the current trial of Bradley Manning and the Grand Jury deliberations into Mr Assange Australia would not further assist or monitor because it is not in Australia’s interests to do so.

Journalists have a right to national shield laws to protect the confidentiality of their sources of information, the WikiLeaks Party (WLP) said today.

In its first major policy declaration, the newly formed Party said current state-based shield laws were inadequate to meet current threats to press freedom. If the WLP is elected to the Senate at the forthcoming federal election in September it will move immediately to introduce a national shield law.